509 
THE WHITE WHALE 
The ship tore on ; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon- 
ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field. 
By salt and hemp !” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the 
deck creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are 
two brave fellows ! — Ha ! ha ! Some one take me up, and launch me, 
spine-wise, on the sea, — for by live-oaks ! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha ! 
we go the gait that leaves no dust behind !” 
“There she blows — she blows ! — she blows ! — right ahead !” was 
now the masthead cry. 
“Aye, aye!” cried Stubb; “I knew it — ye can’t escape — blow on- 
and split your spout, O Whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! 
blow your trump — blister your lungs! — Ahab will dam off your 
blood, as a miller shuts his water-gate upon the stream!” 
And Stubb did but speak out for well-nigh all that crew. The 
frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, 
like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings 
some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept 
out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken 
up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before 
the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; 
and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past 
night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which 
their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all 
these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made 
great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible 
as irresistible ; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so 
enslaved them to the race. 
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them 
all; though it was put together of all contrasting things — oak, and 
maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp — yet all these ran 
into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both 
balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the in- 
dividualities of the crew. This man’s valour, that man’s fear; guilt 
and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all 
directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did 
point to. 
